Kolkata: Arpita Mukherjee is currently in the news after the Enforcement Directorate (ED) recovered a huge amount of cash, gold and other costly items from her residence in connection with the agency's ongoing probe on the West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC)'s recruitment irregularities scam.
A background check of Arpita by the central agency officials has revealed that she had always been driven by super high ambitions and shortcut methods to achieve that in her journey from a small-time Odia actress to her present status as a confidant and close aide of West Bengal Commerce & Industries Minister and Trinamool Congress secretary general, Partha Chatterjee, also had also been arrested by ED in this connection.
In fact, ED sources said that, this over and super high ambitions prompted Arpita to even abandon her widow mother, Minoti Mukherjee at her humble ancestral flat at Belgharia in the northern outskirts of Kolkata.
Minoti Mukherjee has informed a section of the media here that since the time her daughter started residing at her flat at the posh Diamond City residential complex in South Kolkata, from where the cash and gold were seized, her connections with her daughter became highly occasional.
"From the media flashes I came to know that huge cash has been recovered from her flat. I asked her several times in the past about what job she was doing. But I never got any definite answer. Had I known such things I would have surely got her married," Minoti Mukherjee told mediapersons.
Meanwhile, ED sources said that Arpita Mukherjee's deceased father was a Central government employee, who passed away before his retirement.
At that point of time, Arpita was even offered a job on compassionate grounds. However, she refused to accept that job and claimed that she wanted to make a career in modelling and acting.
It is learnt that during her initial years of modelling and acting in insignificant roles in Odia films, she was in touch with her mother.
However, things took a different turn around six years ago after she was introduced to Partha Chatterjee, as the-then West Bengal Education Minister by a real estate promoter whom Arpita knew for a long time.
Soon after that she was spotted in several public programmes with Partha Chatterjee and even at a Durga Puja inauguration programme, where West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee was also present.
Soon after that Arpita started residing at her Diamond Park Complex posh residence.
On Sunday morning, ED officials escorted by central armed forces jawans, took Arpita to the central government-run ESI hospital at Joka in the southern outskirts of Kolkata for a medical check-up.
There she talked to the mediapersons and said that she was innocent. "I am innocent. But I have faith in law, which will take its due course," she said. —IANS